Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  White wines were also ranked in 1855. One of them, Yquem (not yet called Château d’Yquem), received a unique honor: Premier Cru Supérieur (Superior First Growth). Another 11 white wines were ruled First Growths and 12 Second Growths.

  Although Bordeaux classifications had been created before and would be made later, the ones of 1855 moved into history. Only two changes have since been made. A few months after the original determination, Château Cantemerle was added as a Fifth Growth, bringing the number in that category to 18. Then in 1973, Château Mouton was moved from Second Growth to First Growth. The 1855 group remain the Hall of Fame of Bordeaux wines, and even Fifth Growth ones of not particularly high quality usually proudly note on their labels their heritage as “Grand Cru Classé en 1855.” A French journalist taken hostage in Lebanon during the 1980s kept himself sane for three years by each day rattling off the names of all 61 classified red wines.

  The 1855 rankings are no longer a totally valid reference for quality since at some vineyards the skills of winemakers now may be very different from what they once were. Other Bordeaux wines that were not part of the 1855 listing, such as Château Pétrus, are today considered to be equal to First Growths and can command premium prices. Since 1855, other regions within Bordeaux, such as St.-Émilion, have set up their own classifications so that their top wines could also command top prices. Some of these listings are updated regularly and often provide a better standard of current quality. Nonetheless, the 1855 Classification remains in a league of its own.

  The greatest danger ever to face Bordeaux developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the form of a tiny yellow insect that killed the roots of grapevines. In 1862, a friend from New York State sent 154 Native American vines to a southern Rhône Valley winemaker in the hope that they would help eradicate a fungal parasite then causing problems for French winemakers. The vines inadvertently carried aphids that reproduced and spread quickly. From the Rhône the disease began spreading north, reaching Bordeaux in 1869. From France it soon migrated over all of Western Europe. In the 1870s it spread through French vineyards at a rate of forty miles a year. French wine production fell by 75 percent, and the end of European wine seemed to be in sight.

  The French set up a commission to study the disease, which the chief scientist namedphylloxera vastatrix, and which was shortened to simply phylloxera. Every conceivable method was used, without success, to kill the insects and protect vines. Eventually researchers at France’s University of Montpellier discovered that native American vines were immune to the disease. At an 1881 conference in Bordeaux, the scientists showed that French vines grafted onto American rootstock not only resisted phylloxera but also produced good wine. By the end of the century more than two-thirds of French vines were being grown on American rootstock, and the epidemic was over.

  The first half of the twentieth century in France was dominated by the two world wars, which had a major impact on French wine, especially the second, when Germans occupied much of the country and controlled the business. Both wars disrupted world wine trade and encouraged new production in countries like the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

  After the end of World War II, however, Bordeaux quickly regained its prewar prestige. Starting in the late 1960s, international wine consumption, especially in the affluent American and Japanese markets, picked up, and the new wine drinkers loved their Bordeaux. The great red wines, especially the First Growths, were considered by all to be the apex of international red winemaking.

  The world’s most highly regarded white wine at the time was also French. It was grown further north and almost on the other side of the country in Burgundy. Red wines from Burgundy, which are made from Pinot Noir grapes, have a large and devoted following, and some connoisseurs think no wine is better than a velvety Richebourg, Musigny, or Echézeaux. Napoléon’s favorite wine was Chambertin, another Pinot Noir. As he said, “Nothing makes the future so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin.” Burgundy’s white wines, though, have long been considered without equal. The French novelist Alexandre Dumas spoke for many wine drinkers through the ages when he said that Montrachet, one of the great Chardonnays, should be sipped only while kneeling and with head bowed.

  The largest and most famous area of Burgundy is the Côte d’Or or Golden Slope, a string of vineyards that stretches just over thirty miles south from Dijon, a city that gives its name to a spicy mustard, to Maranges, a little-knownappellation just south of the village of Santenay. All told, the vineyards of the Côte d’Or cover about fourteen thousand acres.

  The Côte d’Or is divided into two parts, the northern Côte de Nuits and the southern Côte de Beaune. The Côte de Nuits produces mainly red wines, and the famous village Gevrey-Chambertin is located there. The Côte de Beaune, which begins just east of the city of Beaune, makes twice as much wine as the Côte de Nuits, more than half of it white. The vineyards carry some of the most famous and honored names in white wine, such as Meursault, Puligny, and Chassagne. They are all similar and of high quality, but changes in the soil and climate give each its distinctive characteristics.

  As in all of Burgundy, the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune are divided into small parcels of land calledclimats, which are usually owned by many different growers. There are fewchâteaux or large estates in Burgundy of the kind found in Bordeaux.

  The classifications of Burgundy wines are even more complicated than those of Bordeaux. While Bordeaux has 57appellations, Burgundy has 110 in an area only one-fifth as large. It has its own classification system dating back to 1861, which was done for another Paris world’s fair in 1862. The Comité d’Agriculture de Beaune, Burgundy’s wine capital, asked Dr. Jules Lavalle to select the Têtes de Cuvée (Outstanding Wines). He ranked them as Grands Crus (Great Growths) and Premiers Crus (First Growths).

  The Burgundian classification, which has changed over the years, was never as influential as that of Bordeaux, in part because it included so many wines—now 33 Grands Crus and 562 Premiers Crus. A Grand Cru wine carries just the name of the vineyard where it is grown; for example, Corton or Montrachet. A name of a slightly lower-grade Premier Cru gives both the village and the vineyard where it was grown, such as Pernand Vergelesses (the village) Sous Frétille (the vineyard). A third grade, Appellation Communale, has 45appellations and uses the village name. Examples include Santenay and Chassagne-Montrachet. The fourth or regional level, has 21appellations and gives simply a broad regional name such as Bourgogne (Burgundy) or Côte de Beaune.

  The nomenclature of Burgundy wines is still more complicated because many villages have hyphenated their names to include that of their most famous vineyard. There is a great difference in both quality and price between a Chevalier-Montrachet, which is made from just one vineyard, and a Chassagne-Montrachet, which comes from anywhere in a village of that name.

  The history of wine in Burgundy began with the start of trade between the Gauls and the Romans in the fourth century BC, when the Romans were shipping wine into the beer-drinking area. The Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily wrote in the first century BC that the Gauls “gorge themselves on what the wine merchants bring them, without cutting it with water. And since their passion pushes them to use this beverage in all its violence, they get drunk and fall asleep or into states of delirium.”

  Eventually grapes for winemaking were grown in Burgundy, and Roman wine was soon losing its market. So the Emperor Domitian in the year 92 decreed that half of Gaul’s vineyards had to be ripped up. The decree fortunately was never carried out.

  With the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century came waves of barbarians from the north and east. The Burgondes, who arrived from the shores of the Baltic, pushed out the Romans but ruled only a century before being ousted by the Franks, who dominated the area until the death of Charlemagne in 814. According to tradition, Charlemagne owned a vineyard on the Côte d’Or that had been planted at the point on the hill where the snow melted fastest, which mean
t it got the most sunshine. This is the famed Corton-Charlemagne vineyard, which still produces one of the world’s most sought-after white wines.

  Just as the English have long strongly influenced Bordeaux wine, the Catholic Church for centuries dominated winemaking in Burgundy. During the ninth and tenth centuries, Burgundy was a duchy under the Capetian kings of France and also a bastion of Christianity, with the founding of the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny and the Cistercian abbeys of Cîteaux and Clairvaux. Wine was important for the religious ceremonies of the monks and soon also became the foundation of their great fortunes. As the abbeys grew in size and power, so did their vineyards. The abbey of Cîteaux, south of Dijon, owned the famous Clos de Vougeot vineyard and many others. The monks also developed pruning, and other viticulture techniques that spread throughout the region.

  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the dukes of Burgundy encouraged wine production and profited greatly from their vineyards. Among the many titles the dukes gave themselves was “Lords of the Greatest Wines in Christianity.”

  In 1395 Duke Philip the Bold set out rules to govern Burgundy’s vineyards. He limited wine varietals to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and prohibited the use of the local variety of Gamay, which he described as “a bad and disloyal plant.” That ruling had little lasting effect, and Burgundy’s famous Beaujolais wine is made from Gamay grapes. Philip also outlawed the use of certain fertilizers, including “horns, hoofs, and animal carcasses.” He mandated severe pruning of the vines to limit grape production and set the exact time of harvest. A sworn inspector also had to confirm a wine’s origin. So severe were the controllers that Philip’s wife, Marguerite, Duchess of Flanders, who had her personal vineyard, was refused the right to brand her casks with the covetedB for Burgundy.

  When the Dukes of Burgundy dynasty fell in 1477, the French King Louis XI appropriated many of the vineyards for himself and distributed the rest among his entourage. Burgundy wines got a big boost when Louis XIV’s personal physician prescribed Burgundy as a remedy for his majesty’s artery ailments. Ever since, French doctors have been prescribing wine for whatever ails you.

  After the French Revolution of 1789, properties owned by the churches, abbeys, and nobles were seized and divided into small plots that were spread among many owners. The Napoléonic legal system, which parceled out property among all of a person’s heirs, rather than just giving it to the oldest male as did the English primogeniture laws, resulted in further division. Despite recent land consolidation, the average holding in Burgundy today is only fifteen acres, which is the primary reason the best Burgundy wines are both rare and expensive. Clos de Vougeot, a red wine vineyard of just 125 acres, has nearly eighty owners. Because of this extreme fragmentation, the way in which each winemaker produces a particular Meursault or Puligny-Montrachet can be as important as the soil and the weather. That, in turn, leads to great differences in the quality of wines with very similar names.

  With ownership so widely spread,négociants (wine brokers), who bought wine from many growers, blended it, and then sold it under their own names, dominated the Burgundy wine business starting in the eighteenth century. Most of thenégociants, including Jadot and Bouchard Père et Fils, remain fixtures of the wine trade there today.

  In the late nineteenth century, phylloxera hit Burgundy’s vineyards, just as it did those of Bordeaux. The Montpellier solution of grafting local vines onto American rootstock, however, also stopped the infestation in Burgundy.

  Because the wine-growing area is so small and the wine in such demand, Burgundy has suffered even more than Bordeaux from unscrupulous wine traders. Lesser wines from southern France and North Africa were often blended with a little true Burgundy and given a Burgundy label. The adoption of the strict Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system in 1935, though, protected the reputation of the best Burgundy wines, making it much harder to pass off inferior ones.

  A major change in Burgundy after World War II was the widespread use of the Bordeaux-style estate bottling. Rather than selling their wines in bulk tonégociants or in barrels to restaurants, the more prestigious wineries started to control the bottling and marketing of their wines. Burgundy’s famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had long bottled its own wine, but by the 1960s all of the great vineyards of Burgundy followed its lead.

  If the world had a favorite white wine in the middle of the twentieth century, it was Burgundy Chardonnay. Consumers loved its buttery richness, and winemakers everywhere tried to match it. At its best, a Burgundy Chardonnay has a golden hue, which set the international gold standard for white wine.

  The world’s view of wine at that time can be seen in the itinerary of the seven-month tour Steven Spurrier made in 1965 on behalf of Christopher’s, his employer and London’s oldest wine merchant. Spurrier spent three months in Bordeaux, two months in Burgundy, one week in the Rhône Valley, three weeks in Germany, and one week each in Champagne, the Loire Valley, and Alsace. Then after a summer break, he went to watch the harvests in Jerez, Spain, for Sherry and Oporto, Portugal, for Port. Interestingly, he did not go to Italy at all, and only to Spain and Portugal to check out the fortified wines.

  Hugh Johnson confirmed this view of the wine world in 1971 in the first edition of hisWorld Atlas of Wine . In this book, France towers over the wine business like the Colossus of Rhodes, the giant bronze statue that was a wonder of the ancient world and stood at the entrance of the harbor on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes. Calling France “the undisputed mistress of the vine,” Johnson wrote that it produced “infinitely more and more varied great wines than all the rest of the world.”

  The French section in the first edition of theWorld Atlas of Wine took up 73 of the book’s 247 pages of text. German white wines got 23 pages, while Italy got just 13 pages, and Spain, including Sherry, only 10. The New World, on the other hand, received just 24 pages. Johnson gave 8 pages to California wines. The atlas had only 6 pages on Australian wine and just 2 on the whole of South America. New Zealand was not even mentioned, although a British missionary planted the first vineyard there in 1819.

  Johnson and Spurrier’s bosses were not simply being Eurocentric. They viewed the wine landscape at the time accurately; France ruled the world of wine.

  Chapter Three

  The New Eden

  Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  The saga began a millennium ago. The year was 1000 or perhaps 1001, and the place was somewhere about 400 miles west of Greenland. A group of explorers came ashore from long, narrow sailing ships with carved dragonheads on their bows. Their leader was Leif Eriksson, the son of Erik the Red. Standing out among the blond and blue-eyed seamen was Eriksson’s foster father, Tyrker, a small and dark-complected German. Eriksson ordered his men to build a camp and divided them into two groups. Each day one group went out exploring, while the other stayed in camp.

  One day the exploring group returned one man short. Tyrker had wandered off and become separated from the others. After reprimanding his men, Eriksson and several others set out to find him. They had gone only a short distance when they saw Tyrker running toward them. He was speaking German excitedly, which none of them understood, and waving something in his hands. Finally he calmed down enough to tell them in their language that he had found a place where wild wine grapes were growing. He knew what he was talking about, he said, because wine grapes were abundant in parts of his native country. The next day a large group returned with Tyrker to the place where the wild grapes grew. Eriksson was so impressed that he named the new land Vineland or Wineland, and the explorers took vines with them when they returned home.

  That tale has been repeated by generations of Norsemen to their children. No matter what really happened so long ago, Europeans since the earliest days of exploration of the Western Hemisphere were always astounded by the array of wild grapes they found. Surely, they thought, this must be a perfect place to produce wine as good as,
if not better than, that produced in Europe.

  A century after Columbus, Giovanni da Verrazano, the Italian explorer, wrote in 1592 of the North Carolina coast he had passed: “Many vines growing naturally, which growing up, took hold of the trees as they do in Lombardy, which if by husbandmen they were dressed in good order, without all doubt they would yield excellent wines.”

  Captain John Smith in 1612 reported back to England: “[There is] a great abundance [of vines] in many parts…Of these hedge grapes we made nearly twenty gallons of wine, which was like our British wine, but certainly they would prove good were they well manured.” The new colony of Virginia in 1619 promulgated a law that every man had to plant and maintain ten vines. Later every man over twenty years of age had to plant twenty vines a year. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wine from local grapes was made in 1630, the first summer of colonization. In 1680, a group of Huguenots, French Protestants, landed in South Carolina, intending to make wine there.

  All the attempts at using local grapes to produce wine in colonial America, however, failed. The Europeans named the wild vines Fox grapes because of their foul aroma and taste. Wine made with the grapes was sour and spoiled easily. Barrels of Fox wine sent back to England were dismissed with disdain.

  Gradually the colonists gave up on making wine from native grapes, but that was not the end of their attempts to produce wine. They imported European vines, believing that since those produced good wine in Europe they would do even better in the rich American soil. European vines from the grape speciesVitis vinifera, however, could not survive in the eastern United States. They grew for a couple of years but then soon succumbed to fungus, mildew, or other diseases.